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A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

washingtonpost.com

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Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#2

Post by mdorazio »

"Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn't human."

This will be a fantastic Turing test, at least as far as basic question understanding and natural response formation.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#3

Post by exodust »

Already posted in original form: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11688061

I don't know why SMH would take a Washington Post story and change the title to something stupid, while keeping everything else the same, but that's what they've done.

Wait.. there's one more difference. A pathetic picture of "an AI".

"an AI"? Seriously SMH, just use the original title. Your editorial blundering is embarrassing, and could easily be replaced with "an AI" tasked with re-wording headlines.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#4

Post by wyldfire »

That's stunning. I studied AI in undergrad and I just didn't give it enough of my focus at the time. Little did I know that in my lifetime I'd see real world evidence of computers passing the Turing Test with flying colors.

Of course, Turing was right. What's outside of the set of computable sets? Not much!

I recently read an article headline that talked about creeps using AI to stalk porn stars. It's interesting to think that as computation power continues to grow, there's a huge potential for evil uses of AI. All of the things we see and hear and consider "public" have little or no nefarious uses to other humans. But what about a computer that has human-like capabilities and inexhaustible computation resources? The sci-fi scenarios of conscious AI making decisions to save humanity from itself are not what I fear. The evil humans sitting at the helm of powerful AI is what I fear.

A lot of society's norms are predicated on humans having private thoughts and telling small and large lies as appropriate. What happens when AI-augmented humans know when you're lying?

The future is so exciting and so terrifying.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#5

Post by lordnacho »

Makes sense as a use case. TAs must hear the same questions over and over again from different students, both practical things like "what homework is there" and reference stuff like "What does the line above the X mean?" (No pun intended!)

I wonder how good it is when people don't know what they're asking. This used to happen all the time when I was in tutorials. "I don't get why there's two transistors in a chain". "What's the significance of the process being adiabatic?"

If you can crack that, education will be changed forever, massively.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#6

Post by Bartweiss »

This is definitely an impressive result, but I'm pretty sure it was made easier by the opposite pattern.

I've had a couple of TAs who I strongly suspected of being chatbots, even when I was talking to them in person. I'm still not 100% convinced they were human.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#7

Post by lordnacho »

mdorazio wrote: post #2

"Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn't human." This will be a fantastic Turing test, at least as far as basic question understanding and natural response formation.

Hmm, does it count to use things that are not so much to do with the course?

For example, if a guy is able to answer questions at all times of day, really fast, they're either an AI or Jon Skeet.

Also, real TAs have a life outside of the course. What will an AI say when you ask them whether they enjoyed last night's episode of Game of Thrones?

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#8

Post by Aelinsaar »

wyldfire wrote: post #4

That's stunning. I studied AI in undergrad and I just didn't give it enough of my focus at the time. Little did I know that in my lifetime I'd see real world evidence of computers passing the Turing Test with flying colors. Of course, Turing was right. What's outside of the set of computable sets? Not much! I recently read an article headline that talked about creeps using AI to stalk porn stars. It's interesting to…

Unfortunately, I think that future is as inevitable as the development of that kind of AI. One is almost certainly going to be the consequence of the other.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#10

Post by tfm »

Bartweiss wrote: post #6

This is definitely an impressive result, but I'm pretty sure it was made easier by the opposite pattern. I've had a couple of TAs who I strongly suspected of being chatbots, even when I was talking to them in person. I'm still not 100% convinced they were human.

More human than human is our motto ...

Next step will be to replace the prof, and then have the students replaced by surprisingly attentive interrogative expert systems, and the cycle will be complete.

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